Concurrent Engineering and its Application in Barbecues, Car Washing, and PCB Design

ABSTRACT

Why does concurrent engineering matter? All of us are looking for ways to do things faster, whether at work designing a PCB or at home with more mundane tasks such as cleaning the car or cooking a meal. Of course, at work the stakes are much higher. We are in unforgiving competition and we know what happens if our PCB based product doesn’t hit the market window with the right price, quality and performance. Concurrent engineering introduces parallelism into our design process so that we can shorten, accelerate or recover our schedules. It allows different disciplines to impact costs, quality and performance earlier in the design cycle when it matters. Ultimately, it makes us more competitive so that our products are successful in the global marketplace.